He’s out. He says it’s because his entanglement with the Epstein scandal was a “distraction”.
You know who else is entangled with Epstein? Trump. Maybe he should follow suit.
I approve this use of the scientific method to debunk the Portland police. They fed this stupid rumor that antifa was mixing quick-setting cement into milkshakes to do more harm to the fascists they were protesting. There was no evidence of such behavior, but it quickly became a right-wing talking point.
So Willamette Week tested the assertion. They made vegan milkshakes, then stirred in cement. It can be done! Unfortunately for the accusers and the credibility of the Portland police, it can’t be done surreptitiously.
Neither the Portland Police Bureau nor any witness has been able to produce credible evidence that a single cement milkshake was thrown June 29. But a concrete milkshake is distinctive, as we learned. It’s gritty, clumpy and a dark color. If such concoctions weren’t seen June 29, that is almost certainly because there weren’t any.
Cement milkshakes also won’t set, confirming what I heard from many people that sugar interferes with the process.
Do you have an empty prison in your neighborhood? ICE will fill it up for you, no matter how dilapidated and horrid it might be.
When members of Congress reached a bipartisan deal to end the government shutdown in February, they gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement a simple instruction: Stop detaining so many people. Instead, ICE pushed its detention population to an all-time high of 54,000 people, up from about 34,000 on an average day in 2016 and well above the 40,520 target Congress set for ICE.
Now, just after Congress rejected another request for more detention money, ICE is continuing to spend money it hasn’t been given. Mother Jones has learned that ICE has started using three new for-profit immigration detention centers in the Deep South in recent weeks. One of them has seen the death of three inmates following poor medical treatment and a violent riot in 2012 that left a guard dead.
That one is the Adams County correctional facility in Mississippi, which was so awful and poorly run that the Justice Department shut it down…but nothing can be too bad for housing immigrants and immigrant children.
Don’t overlook the key phrase there: for-profit detention centers. The Adams County facility is run by CoreCivic, the largest such organization in the country, and which was founded by — hold on to your hats — a group of Republican politicians and lobbyists. These vermin need to make money somehow, so they’re happy to get government contracts to abuse people.
CoreCivic also owns the Prairie Correctional Center, a currently empty 1600 bed facility just down the road from me, in Appleton, MN. You can bet they’re drooling at the thought of turning it into a money mill once again for ICE.
You know, for-profit prisons of any kind are an abomination. They all ought to be closed. And the laws ought to change so they stop throwing hordes of people into any prison at all — one sign that we might be a nascent fascist nation is that we’ve got the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world.
Oh god no. Not another one. Tom Steyer has announced his candidacy. He doesn’t stand a chance.
I have a suggestion for all the wanna-bes.
Three quarters of you ought to be running for the House or Senate, ‘k? If you want to do some good, there’s where you should be, because you might have a chance of succeeding.
If you are a filthy rich billionaire who has some liberal goals (you’re not going to be promoting leftist/progressive goals, because you’ve already demonstrated a life-long commitment to stealing from workers), I have a different suggestion: run for president on the Republican side. You’ll do more damage to Trump that way, you might peel away the Republicans who are disgusted with Trump, and if you win, either the nomination or even the presidency, you’ll have transformed the Republican party. Also imagine the chaos in the confused media. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Try it. Think outside the box. Trump could be wrecked even before the election, or the Republicans could end up tearing each other apart.
Read these old pre-WWII newspaper articles, in which a very nice American Quaker is arguing (to a conference of rabbis, no less) that if Jews throughout the world try to instill into the minds of Hitler and his supporters recognition of the ideals for which the race stands, and if Jews appeal to the German sense of justice and the German national conscience, I am sure the problem will be solved more effectively and earlier than otherwise.
It’s weird. The guy also repudiates the notion of boycotts, because that’s economic violence. Buy from fascists, because capitalism is a hell of a drug. There’s even an article from another person arguing that Hitler’s supporters aren’t racist, they’re just economically anxious.
We’ve been through all of this in the 1930s. Unthinking pacifism didn’t work then, it’s not going to work now.
I agree 100% with this video. Antifa are part of democracy’s immune system, and I applaud their efforts to defeat the growing fascism in this country.
A prosecutor involved in trafficking cases in New York writes about what to expect in the new trial of Jeffrey Epstein. Basically, he’s screwed.
But, finally, it looks like justice will be served to Epstein in the form of new sex-trafficking charges filed by the formidable U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.
Epstein has reportedly been arrested for trafficking dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005. And this time, Epstein shouldn’t expect the ridiculous sweetheart deal he got the first time around.
Charges of federal sex trafficking carry mandatory minimums of 10-15 years on each count. Mandatory means mandatory. In other words, short of a cooperation agreement with the government—which in the SDNY famously means full cooperation against all possible other subjects and targets—Epstein will serve at least 10-15 years in prison (possibly more depending on the number of counts) if convicted.
He ought to be sweating, but that last paragraph brings up a legal problem. If convicted, Epstein is a horrible sleaze who has committed great evil, and yeah, he should be locked up. But should we complain if he gets a reduced sentence if he provides evidence that sends a host of other sleazy pervs tumbling down? He could, conceivably, be the downfall of people like Dershowitz and Clinton and Trump and other highly connected rich goons. Would that be worth turning an Epstein loose?
Also, the writer speculates that Barr could potentially meddle in the case to protect those same highly connected rich goons. What is our recourse if that kind of blatant corruption occurs?
This could be an interesting and revealing case. I’ve been conditioned by the last few decades of bullshit to expect that what will be revealed is only greater levels unscrupulous grift than ever I imagined. I guess that still fits the definition of “interesting”. I wish I lived in a less interesting country, though.
Jeffrey Epstein with some random people
Can it be? Will Jeffery Epstein get his comeuppance?
Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for allegedly sex trafficking dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005, and will appear in court in New York on Monday, according to three law enforcement sources. Saturday’s arrest by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force comes about 12 years after the 66-year-old financier essentially got a slap on the wrist for allegedly molesting dozens of underage girls in Florida.
The article also points out that it’s a mystery where he got his millions of dollars. He was a math teacher who broke bad into the lucrative world of hedge funds, but no one seems to know what he was doing, his employees were invisible, and he seems to have just one client. Something shady was going on, which makes me wonder if the reason he got such a sweetheart deal before is that he’s a key to unraveling a tangled web of nefarious activity by the rich and powerful.
Speaking of the rich and powerful, Alan Dershowitz sure seems to be sweating copiously suddenly.
I’m certainly not celebrating today. We’ve got more to regret than to praise.
We’re running concentration camps on our southern border. It’s not a recent aberration, either: we were enslaving people before we became a nation, we built this country on the labor of the barracoon. We slaughtered the native population and herded the survivors into reservations. My university was founded on the site of an Indian school, where children were ripped from their families and imprisoned to be taught White Man’s Ways; there’s a big sign outside the building where I work to remind me of that every day.
We’ve been at war since our founding. It’s easy to forget, since we civilians are kept fairly well insulated from the consequences, but if you’re one of the working poor drafted to fight, or worse, one of the targets of our wrath, you know it. Nowadays we do most of our killing remotely, with drones or bombers, so even the military suffers little pain.
We’ve elected a crude, ignorant boor to the presidency who is disgracing our nation before the eyes of the world. We have a state propaganda channel that funnels lies to the populace. The “newspaper of record” provides a mouthpiece to apologists for the status quo. We’re having a goddamn military parade in the capitol today. I’m torn between thinking that at least it honestly represents the spirit of the country and thinking it is deplorable and vile.
I’m expected to treat this as a holiday celebration?
I’m not going to. I’m waiting to celebrate the revolution that erases this stain.
Mark Bray explains the history, goals, and philosophy of antifa in Teen Vogue. Every paragraph is a jewel, you should go read it. Just a taste:
Antifa grows out of a larger revolutionary politics that aspires toward creating a better world, but the primary motivation is to stop racists from organizing; doing that can take many forms, and so the tactical repertoire of anti-fascists is broad.
The vast majority of what they do does not entail any physical confrontation. They focus on researching white supremacists and neo-Nazis across different social media platforms, figuring out who their leaders are, what other groups they are networking with, [and] where they are trying to hold events, so they can contact hotels or local venues to get the owners to cancel the events and, if they refuse to cancel, organize a boycott or campaigns of public pressure against them. They also organize public education campaigns and form alliances with unions and social movements to organize large demonstrations. Part of it, however, and this is what gets the most attention, entails self-defense and, at times, confronting these groups before they can gain enough momentum to promote their politics.
